The Most Important Of The Most Important Elections

Eight years ago, in the heat
of the election between George Bush and John Kerry, The New York
Times ran a Week
In Review piece, consisting entirely of quotations from some
candidate (or proponent of some candidate) declaring the
then-current election, “The Most Important Election since [X],”
wherein X equals some span of time. The earliest example was from
the 1864 election, taken from a Times op-ed penned by
Lincoln supporter Gen. James H. Lane, and from there it’s a march
through American history, ending with a litany of examples from
2004. The secret was out: important people frequently declare each
election more important than all the other elections.

In 2008, Christopher Clausen published an
essay in The American Scholar titled, aptly, “The Most
Important Election in History,” in which he pinned down the
historical context of the perennial claim. “Has there ever been an
election that some people didn’t narcissistically proclaim the most
important in their lifetimes? Perhaps, but such episodes are
evidently so rare that they never get recorded.”

The phenomenon had been called out, explicitly, and from that
moment forward, there was no use in invoking the phrase ever
again—for which we are grateful, as Wednesday launches the
presidential debates. The American voting public had been put on
notice and were too smart to fall for such a thing.

That did not turn out to be the case.

The question of the relative importance of an election is a
tricky one to pin down. Some results can be deemed important purely
on the identity of the victor: 1960 gave us our first Catholic
president, and 2008 our first black one. The achievements of
administrations are more ineffable, and sometimes open to historic
interpretation. For example, some historians would tell you that
the election of Ronald Reagan resulted in decades of prosperity and
expansion, and other would tell you that 1980 was the beginning of
the end of the Middle Class. Consensus is that 1860 and 1864 were
definitely Important Elections, as the election of Lincoln set the
stage for the Civil War, and his reelection confirmed that the
Civil War would be fought to the bitter end. That was a hundred and
fifty years ago, of course, which might be how long it takes for
historians to agree.

There’s also the question of knowing the unknowable: sure, 1932
was an important election, because it was Franklin D. Roosevelt,
the winner, that ended the Great Depression and gave us what we now
think of as the social safety net. But what if Herbert Hoover had
won reelection? His first term wasn’t so hot, but who’s to say that
a second wouldn’t have had consequences that would be felt even
today. To deem the importance of an election, a choice made, means
having to imagine what the alternative would have been, the option
that never happened. And the example above circles back to the
previous point, as some would have you believe that the New Deal
was actually the beginning of generations of dependency and of the
end for capitalism. So, yes, it’s a tricky question,
importance.

But not so tricky as to dissuade anyone from invoking it during
this election. The most egregious example of Most Important
Election of the current cycle is Newt Gingrich, who would
frequently state, and even tweet,
that the 2012 election is “the most important election since 1860.”
That’s a pretty novel approach to the [X] in the equation, as
customarily the amount of time since the last Important Election
occurred ranges from “a generation” to “our lifetime” on up to “in
history,” but then again Gingrich cites historical dates like a kid
with a new thesaurus drops big words. And Gingrich was not alone.
Politicians and pundits including
Bill O’Reilly,
Nancy Pelosi,
Rush Limbaugh,
Rick Santorum (parroting Gingrich), Chuck Norris,
Reince Priebus,
Bobby Jindal,
Ramesh Ponnuru and even Bob
Grant (remember him?) have also jumped on the Most Important
boat. If volume is the determining factor, we are picking
importance out of our teeth already and Election Day and we haven’t
even had the first debate.

This intransigence did not go unnoted. In fact, it resulted in a
hail storm of thought pieces and blog posts, from heavyweights like
the Washington Post and The New York Times, and also from everyone else—the
Atlantic, Commentary,
DailyKos, Politico,
RealClearPolitics
Big Government and The American Thinker. And personal blogs too! Don’t want
to leave them out. But it is agreed: the expression Most Important
Election Since [X] is always a clear exaggeration that has
everything to do with politics and nothing to do with governing, so
can we please just cut it out once and for all, or at least until
the final think piece is published. (Last!)

We get the joke. To invoke Most Important Election [X] is now
trite, trite and as transparent as it was the first time it was
invoked, maybe back in 1860 and maybe before. It’s a cheap sleight
of hand to whip up voter interest, to swindle them into thinking
something’s at stake, vague enough that the voter can superimpose
whatever something they’d like to be at stake. Hopefully, as George
Washington ran for election in the first one, in 1788, unopposed
(essentially, as at the time the runner-up was elected vice
president, so other candidates were gunning for veep, plus also
Washington didn’t so much run as wait in Mount Vernon for the thing
to be over already), he had the good sense to declare that contest
as the most important election in the history of the United States,
because it was the last election for which that was empirically
true.

There oughta be a law. Clausen’s Law: the proclaimed importance
of an election is directly proportional to the desperation of the
speaker.

But hyperbole will persist, and it will persist with players
perhaps more deft than Newt Gingrich (statistical lock). Every
election is the most important election in [X], at least to the
candidates. It’s a win-or-go-home game, and questions of predictive
historical accuracy are not at the front of the minds of those
running for office. If a harmless fib is what it takes to convince
you to go out and vote, then so be it, and hopefully the candidate
will escape the on-fire pants or the Pinocchios or whatever the
soft guardians of fact will be using to denote fibbing in the
future. And you will grit your teeth every time you hear it, and
maybe write a couple outraged paragraphs to go with the headache
that teeth-grinding causes, but it’s really no worse than the same
headache caused by the Fox Robots that bookend Sunday football, and
certainly no worse than the blinding brainshock induced by the
umpteenth year of Talk Like A Pirate Day. It’s the price we pay for
our little democracy, for the pretension that all our votes count,
even if we live in a state, like New York or Texas, so entrenched
that even the vote suppression wet dreams of Hans
von Spakovsky could not sway the electoral college one way or
the other, we still need to go to the polls.

And that’s the nubbin of truth hinted at by this trope every
election is the most important election, whether for alderman or
president or comptroller or state flower. Elections are the will of
the people, and every vote unvoted is like a Mega Millions winner
failing to claim the ticket. The options are never ideal and
sometimes gruesome, and obviously influenced by all sorts of
non-voting factors starting with the Citizens United decision and
moving on from there to Election Day weather, but the mechanism,
tarnished and imperfect, creaky and exploitable, is there. It took
a hundred years and change to ensure that everyone could use it.
Voting is easy to be cynical about, but, on paper, actually and
pretty freaking nifty.

Yes, there is something tawdry about the whole process, and
Clausen’s Law is only one small example. The simple act of having a
political television ad ambushing you during an episode of “Fringe”
is all you need to know about the plasticity of the process, its
inherent awkwardness. People really talk like that? Does that guy
iron his polo shirts? Most importantly, how stupid do they think
you are, talking down to you like that, thinking you susceptible to
such grade-school rhetoric? Pretty stupid, actually. And that is
why we vote, to show that they’re wrong. Not this year, and maybe
not even soon, but looking back on where we started and then where
we are now, it’s very clear: progress marches on. We voted it
in.